Recent updates

5/18/2012	Three very powerful communication spells have been added. They are definitely the best area-effect combat spells currently in the game. As forum readers are aware, the hero scoring system has been revised, with the scale shifted by half-a-level against the players. Also, new recruits will now begin with a heroic rating as opposed to a cautious rating. And of course, another batch of items have been added, and monster equipment/stats/treasure continue to undergo refinements.
5/14/2012	Breath weapon attacks now have limited range. Lightning breath has the longest range of up to about 6 squares, while poison cloud breath weapons have the shortest range at around 3 squares. Magic using monsters have learned to count a little better, and will be less likely to use area effect spells that will hit more allies than enemies. Certain battle effects such as daze, paralysis, slow, stun, and fatigue will now affect your movement rate. Uh oh! New items have been added, and a few monsters have undergone minor revisions to stats, equipment, and treasure.
5/10/2012	A new effort to push players into more dangerous adventures has been added, as forum visitors have been aware of for a while now. Every character has a new hero score, which has profound effects on xp earned. All existing characters were recently given a hero score of cautious, which is also the level given to all new recruits. A cautious hero will only gain 1/2 xp from adventuring. If your hero score improves, you will gain more xp from adventures and at the highest levels, you will even get additional bonus skill points. If your hero score drops you will get fewer xp, and it can even drop to 0% from adventures. You can view your hero score on your character page, right up at the top under your name. Hovering the mouse over this score will give additional information about the effects of your current level and how to improve it. You can also view the hero score on the people page. The people page lists not only the rating, but the actual numeric score so you can see who is close to gaining or losing a rating. The rating itself considers the difficulty setting of the last 20 adventures you went on. Random adventures count as 2 levels harder than they really are. Incomplete adventures where you exit without killing everything count as 2 levels lower. Characters who flee are credited with an adventure 4 levels lower. The bulk of your score is based off the hardest adventure in your last-20 history, although more recent adventures are weighted more heavily than earlier ones. The balance of the score is a sum of all 20 adventures added up, again weighted more heavily toward the more recent adventures. In short, to give your hero score a big boost, go complete an adventure at a more challenging difficulty setting. Don't be discouraged by the initial cautious rating that your characters are suffering. After they have a few new adventures under their belts you will see that score drifting toward their proper value. You should find that the only way to keep a high rating is to, periodically, complete a very challenging adventure. This is intentional! Characters who never push themselves into a top-level adventure should see their improvement suffer, slow, and ultimately stop. One badass adventure in twenty will be enough to keep the score respectable.
5/9/2012	Weekly updates: The duration of create wall spells has been reduced. Several new items have been added. The previous update pertaining to occasional wrong-level adventures can be ignored. This feature has been removed and adventures will always be of the level selected. A new hero rating has been added for each character. This is displayed below the person's name on the character page. While it has no current effect, it will in the future. Characters with ratings below heroic will suffer xp penalties as outlined in the forum discussion about this topic. Those with hero ratings above heroic will be given additional bonus skill point checks every adventure.
5/2/2012	Ammunition combining has been added. If you have enough identical instance of the same ammunition type that can combine to a bigger type in your inventory, they will automatically be combined when you equip one. Typical non-magic single items such as arrow (one) require 5 to combine to (few), then two for each bigger combination. Finally, a reason to buy lots of single arrows when they are cheap!
4/28/2012	A new adventure chat command /objects has been added. This will tell you if you have seen any wells or exits on your adventure and what floor they are on. Some new items have been added, including some knives, which prompted yet another revision of knives. Two things were addressed. First, they were too expensive given their low durability and all knife prices have been dropped by about 1/3. Secondly, they were a bit too powerful compared to other 1-handed weapons because of their high speed. The speed has been left unchanged, but a slight handicap has been added in the form of -5% defense when wielding knives. This makes a lot of sense, because a knife does not have the ability to parry heavy blows nor keep enemies at bay in the way other weapons do. The same logic has been carried over to natural weaponry (fists). Fists are now -10% defense. This logic has also been applied to monster claws, bites, and other natural attacks which are all now either -5% or -10% defense. This is experimental, and will be reviewed in about two weeks to see how profoundly the game has been impacted. Finally, more clan world progress is being made. At some point in the near future food, water, and shelter requirements will be added. When this happens everyone on the clan worlds will be sent back to Mythic City and given a full refund of their original transit costs. Then you will be able to send characters over in a more thoughtful manner, since certain skills will be imperative for the fist clan world pioneers to survive.
4/24/2012	The staff class of weapons has been overhauled. Generally speaking, they do much more damage and have much improved durability. Speed has gone down, and cost has gone up substantially, primarily because of the durability increases. They are now conforming to the same standards as all other weapons and they are still the least damaging but fastest of all the two-handed weapons.
4/22/2012	A new shield skill has been added. Learning this skill will increase the defensive bonus you get when using a shield. Every skill level will add a +20% bonus to the defensive value of your shield. This skill can be learned by studying combat techniques, various one-handed weapons, or a handful of other relevant skills. Certain classes such as grunts or fighters may discover the skill when gaining levels as well.
4/20/2012	The property requirements for clan sizes has been removed. There is no longer a display of property owned, nor a way to buy more. The property itself has been sold back to the city for full value, and your clan gold will reflect this. Please note that you may wish to keep most of that gold on hand, as there will be ways to invest it in your clan world development in the future.
4/20/2012	A quick overview of other recent activity: Hovering the mouse over skill names now gives a brief description. The clan-world map is being improved. It now shows characters-per-zone and moving the mouse around the world displays zone information about terrain, weather, etc. Clicking a clan-world zone lists the characters in that zone. The clan page as a whole has been cleaned up a bit and redundant information removed. A dozen or so new items have been added, including some market items. Monster rebalancing is under way again, without about 20 monsters (so far) being reviewed/updated. The defense bonus provided by weapon specialization had been reduced by about 20%. Note that this chance affects monsters too. Every skill level now provides +2 defense, as opposed the old way of +0 and +5 defense every other level. Membership now affects skill mission frequency (2x, as for all other membership skill point adjustments). Thank you everyone who pointed out this omission.
4/9/2012	Although recent work has been focused on unseen back-end development of the clan worlds, one quick adjustment to adventure difficulty was made. There is now a 10% chance that each adventure will be of an unusual level. That is, you might choose a mythic adventure and see that the adventure level is shockingly low. Or surprisingly high on an easy adventure for that matter. Pay attention to the actual level of your adventures once they begin! This change has been made to add a little danger to the lives of players who routinely avoid the more challenging adventures.
3/29/2012	(1) A new mid-to-upper level monster was added, along with a bunch of new items. (2) A few minor changes were made to the daychange code to fine-tune recent adjustments and correct the healing order of wounded characters. Clan world actions (healing, medic, etc) will now only affect others if in the same zone. (3) A group flee button was added for party leader action selection as a time-saving measure. It, of course, sets everyone in the group to fleeing. Additionally, the action word fleeing in the character boxes is now highlighted so as to be harder to overlook. (4) The clan page now has the standard site header and links sections on the top for a more uniform look and easier navigation.
3/24/2012	Some new weapons were added, and the overhaul of club class weapons has been completed. They are now standardized along the same lines as swords and axes. They do less damage than either their sharper counterparts, but are somewhat more durable. Their speed and cost tend to be mid-way between the fast and expensive swords and the slow and cheap axes. Compared to before they are certainly cheaper but also slower and weaker, as they should be, given the general affordability of learning club skills. On the magic side of things, new magic: knowledge spells were added for detecting monsters near the party. Detect creature 1-4 will work through walls, and the range and duration depend on the version cast. Additionally, the existing knowledge spells have all (except for the weakest) had their sp costs reduced.
3/23/2012	More changes have been made to wean the game off healing magic dependency. The long-term plan is to decrease the total cost of daychange healing to allow for further reductions in life magic availability. The costs of daychanges have been reduced approximately 20%. Clan tax collection was similarly reduced. The net effect is that character money earned from adventuring will now pay for more daychanges than previously, effectively yielding more natural healing for the same amount of gold. A new medicine skill has been added as well. It is unlocked by studying trade skill basics or, occasionally, from increases to certain other related skills. A few classes, such as shamans, will occasionally get discounts to the medicine skill upon gaining levels. Any characters with the medicine skill will use all their time left each day helping the wounded. Successful skill checks yield bonus healing chances for injured characters. To balance these changes, clerics have become less common and slightly less effective. The skill cost for them to learn magic: life has been increased about 15% and they have become more difficult to qualify for, with the willpower requirement increasing from 13 to 14. Barely related, but quite helpful nonetheless, the amount of Mythic City property needed to maintain characters has been slashed in half.
3/21/2012	The Mythic Warfare server suffered some damage during a recent storm. It appears to be back online for the moment, but may suffer additional outages in the next few days until replacement hardware arrives. All memberships have been extended for 10 days to make up for the downtime.
3/2/2012	Several new items have been added. Axes (1 handed) have been given their long-overdue update. Generally speaking they are now more durable and do higher damage, but have worse speed than before.
3/1/2012	The adventure chat program has been expanded a bit. By default, any message sent from an adventure is on the adventure channel [A] and only visible to other people on or viewing that adventure. Chats sent from the tavern are on the tavern [T] channel. Private or game generated messages are on the private [P] channel. This will cut down on seeing message about other adventures on your screen. All messages sent from the tavern will always be on the tavern channel. If you don't wish to see messages from players in the tavern, you can turn off that channel by using the new /channel command in adventure chat. For example, /channel tavern off will prevent you from seeing messages sent over that channel (you can turn it on again with channel tavern on). If you want to send a chat over the tavern channel from the adventure screen, you may do so by using .T xxx where xxx is your message. That way you can still communicate with the tavern (and players everywhere who have the tavern channel on) without actually having to leave your adventure and enter the tavern page. Note that you may not see your own message if you've turned that channel off! You may also, from the adventure screen, send private messages to other players by using .P 'Clan Name' xxx where xxx is the message and Clan Name is the name of the player you wish to contact. Note the single quotation marks around the player's name, which are unfortunately needed to specify where the name stops and the message begins, since some clan names have spaces in them. As always, chatting /help from the adventure screen will give you a list of these (and all other) chat commands.
2/25/2012	The on-map group display looks a bit different now during adventures. Many values are displayed. First is the health of the weakest member as a percentage (and color). Next is the current and total movement points (mp). Third is the number of characters in the party (in black) and the available space in the group. Another new high-level monster was added, along with a bunch of new items. Both new monsters are rather boring, unfortunately, but should at least give a little more variety to high level adventures.
2/24/2012	The first equipment set has been added. While currently a novelty, it is possible that equipment sets will become very useful in the future. The first set is a collection of five Nightwatch armor pieces. While useful individually, their value increases by adding +5 defense (3+ items), +1 speed (4+ items), and +1 toughness (all 5 items) when you equip multiple set items.
2/23/2012	A new high level monster has been added. A dozen or so new items have also been added. On the adventure screen, you will now see your available group space printed on the group selection buttons along the top of the screen, and your current and total MP (movement points) will be displayed to the right of the map.